[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story."

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week's "On Story," British original series, "The Office" co-creator and comedy writer extraordinaire Stephen Merchant.

- Ultimately, I think I am optimistic and I think have great faith in the sort of humanity of people.

If people communicate and talk, they will find common ground.

But at the same time, I'm cynical in the sense that I think people are flawed.

Everyone's flawed, everyone makes mistakes.

I'm very happy to share my failings and I think a lot of the work I do is about people making mistakes, falling over in one form or another.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] In this episode, comedy writer Stephen Merchant discusses co-creating the UK original series, "The Office," his work on "Hello Ladies" and his new series, "The Outlaws," while speaking to crafting relatable characters and how he found comedy inspiration from drama.

[typewriter ding] - I always aspired to being a television writer and specifically initially sitcom.

And I was very influenced by a lot of great American shows, "Mash," "Roseanne," things like that, but also "John Cleese," "Monty Python" and the "Faulty Terrorists."

My aspiration was like, wouldn't it be great to make a show, a sitcom that people think fondly of?

But I wasn't entirely sure what that route is.

And I thought for some reason if I got into radio and I became a DJ, I'd only have to work for like two hours in the afternoon and all the other time I could spend writing.

This is my plan.

Was like I'm gonna get into radio, right?

And so got a job somehow on a radio station in London that just opened up and the guy that hired me was Ricky Gervais.

And he had somehow sweet talked his way onto this radio station, having had no experience and I had had marginal university experience.

And I remember the interview, he said, "If you promise to do all of the work, I'll give you this job."

And I'm like, well, I can't argue with that.

So I agreed to-- I moved to London and then I very quickly was offered an opportunity to train at the BBC and I turned it down cause I was having fun with Ricky.

And then my parents called me and said, "You turned that job down to that internship at the BBC, what are you talking about?

You'll get a pension."

And I'm like, I'm 22.

Yeah, I need a pension.

So I jettisoned Ricky having only just started working with him and I joined the BBC and I did all kinds of strange jobs there.

But one of them was I had a camera crew for a day and they said, film a little documentary about your neighborhood or about the barbershop or whatever.

And I said to Ricky, "How about we do a fake documentary?"

And that fake documentary became a prototype that became "The Office" in the UK and then "The Office" in the US and we filmed it at an old place he'd worked at for like, in a day.

And suddenly we had this tape and it was kind of, there was an alchemy to it, you know, there was a sort of magic that kind of caught fire on screen.

And so we went to the BBC and they liked it and we said we'd like to write and direct and he's gonna be in it.

And you've never heard of any of us.

And I remember the man at the BBC said, "Why should we let you do this?"

And I said, and I didn't even realize this was arrogant.

I said, "We might be the next Orson Welles."

[audience laughing] Very quickly, we had to sort of learn on the job, you know, and we shot, I remember we shot sort of-- I remember the producers came to us after the first week and said, you filmed three times more than any other production would shoot in a week.

We can't afford to keep shooting this much content.

So yeah, I think it was there, there was a sort of arrogance of youth.

There was a, not knowing what we didn't know, just gave us a kind of a bulletproof-ness that you can never get back, strangely.

You know, you have a confidence in that first thing that you can never get again.

Cause everything else now is you know-- well, is not as good as "The Office."

You know what I mean?

Whereas, at the time, you didn't, you didn't know any better.

- Oh, thanks.

- All right mate.

Have a good night.

See you later.

- See you later.

Wish us luck on our date.

- Yeah, good night.

- It's not a date is it?

She's got a boyfriend and I'm playing her.

What sort of date would that be?

I think you know.

And a hundred quid, what would I get for that?

Not that I would, cause you wouldn't-- everything I imagine.

I'm not imagining any of it, but I do know what sort of-- I'm just, okay then there we go.

I'm just, oh, carry that.

- So, in "The Office," that was a unique concept, the way you guys did it.

How did that work in the editing process of it?

I would imagine at times things didn't come across as you were expecting them to or didn't go quite the emotional direction that you were expecting or wanting?

- Well, the great, the huge bonus of that documentary style, there's pros and cons.

The pro is that when you set up the idea that there's a film crew following it, everything the characters say has a sort of weight somehow.

So for instance, in the romance storyline, because they can't be open about how they feel with each other, because these cameras are around, if they have an intimate private conversation and the camera's spying on them, it has an electricity and a charge that's really thrilling and fun because you can't go home with them and you can't read their diaries and you can't hear their internal monologues.

So it has a-- there's a deliciousness to it.

I always thought it was a bit like a kind of Victorian romance where, you know, etiquette won't allow you to tell someone how you feel, you know.

And so that was really great.

But it also gave you all these constraints because you couldn't go home with the characters and you couldn't have a sort of eye of God spying on them.

And so that became quite constraining.

But the other great bonus was the talking heads.

So if you were editing as you went and you thought something wasn't clear, you could just go in the next day and you could just have Ricky have a conversation to the camera where he explains what he's thinking, you know, pontificates to the supposed interviewer.

Well tonight's the night of the quiz and you know, duh duh da, and you can set up an entire premise in three lines.

And I think because of the documentary form, it's a bit looser and you can restructure and costumes can change, doesn't matter quite as much cause it's got a looser, rougher feel to it.

I find editing is much more difficult when you're in a more formal shooting style.

- So in that process of going from that right away, this hit that two young guys who had, you know, a lot of armor went ahead and pulled off in a big successful way.

How did you go into the next one?

- I think that I was always a little bit of a historian of film and TV and on the one hand that helped us with the American adaptation of "The Office" cause I-- like you'd noticed that, the number of things had unsuccessfully transferred and sometimes that was because the originators of the original version had been involved in the remake and that they had somehow meddled too much or they didn't know enough about the country into which they were remaking it.

And although I feel like I know America very well, ultimately I don't quite know it as well as someone who grew up and worked here.

And so my one big contribution was to persuade Ricky that we shouldn't do it and that Greg Daniels-- or we should have someone else do it and translate it and sort of do their version and run with the ball.

And so similarly when we tried to follow "The Office" in the UK, it was like, well we can't, this seems to have caught on a life of its own and certainly in the UK it becomes something of a sort of cultural touchstone.

And we thought there's no way you can top that so all you can do is just do something that's gonna be fun for you.

And so we ended up doing this show called "Extras" that was in part born of our experience of having been in the TV business and finding it a very strange world full of very strange people.

- Her boyfriend likes to talk dirty on the phone and she doesn't know what to say to him.

- Oh yeah, that can be the awkward.

Oh yeah, why don't you just start off with something light, you know, like...

I'd love it if you stuck your Willy Wonka between my Oompa Loompas, you know, something a bit fun, a bit jokey.

And then you can get more hardcore, rattle off the old classics like, I'm playing with my dirty pillows, I'm aching for your big purple-headed womb ferret.

And then go straight in hard like get around here cause I'm fudding myself stupid and I'm bloody loving it.

All right?

- Yeah.

- Anyway.

- A lot of that show was about compromise and what people do to compromise to become successful.

And we were lucky that we hadn't had to because we were sort of under the radar.

- You were also talking today about-- I think you were the only person talking about writing in this incredibly loving way of like, you've loved to get there.

And maybe that was a joke.

I don't know.

- No, no, I do, I enjoy the process of it.

I used to write comic books in my room when I was a kid that no one ever read.

And I liked the, sort of, the process of it.

And I liked the-- I still enjoy the challenge of it, the puzzle solving.

I like all those aspects of it.

I get frustrated like anybody else and I bang my head against the wall.

- You were talking also earlier about how you, you sort of taught yourself your film language, but who were those influences for you?

- You know, I think back to even something like "The Office" and there's influences in there.

There's a scene, the famous scene in "The Godfather" where he has to shoot the corrupt policeman in the cafe and if you remember-- but he goes to get the gun that's hidden in the toilet and the A train or whatever goes overhead and you hear the rattling of the train.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

And it's kind of Pacino's brain, sort of like the building up the tension of like, will he shoot this cop?

And in "The Office," we had a similar thing, instead of a train, it was a photocopier [laughter] and it was not gonna shoot a cop, but is it, am I gonna ask that girl out on a date?

But it was still like, yeah, we'll do the 'shooting the corrupt cop scene' now.

Get the photo copier Rick.

So it's amazing how the most unlikely things can be influences.

I think there's this assumption that sort of comedy is its own thing and you'd be influenced by comedy.

But I mean, I think good comedy is as influenced by drama.

[typewriter ding] - Okay, I'm huge fan of "Hello Ladies" and feel shorted not making a tall joke and really wish that we had had another season of it.

And because what we got from that season was this great character, Stuart Pritchard.

And so, you know, that wasn't just a comedy and yet it's a comedy.

So, from that perspective, who were you exploring with him?

Cause it feels like maybe you were exploring you a little bit.

- On the one hand, I'm very lucky in that I've not had great traumas in my life and you know, I think about people I admired growing up like Richard Pryor, but Richard Pryor was dealing not only with the racial prejudice of his period, but the fact that his mother, you know, I think worked, was a sex worker in a brothel and so on.

And my mother's done very little sex work as- as- as far as we're aware.

[audience laughing] I've been very lucky that I've genuinely not had those sorts of traumas.

So on the one hand, that's great, but from a creative place that's really boring.

But the subject matter that does interest me is thinking about growing up and about the people I saw and about lives, that idea of lives of quiet desperation, of people sort of getting to 75 and looking back on their life and sort of thinking, what did I do with it?

And I've always found that very moving and very touching as a subject matter because I think that yes, there's lots of very big important sort of political stories to tell, but there's also those personal, those small stories about kind of average lives, if you want to put it that way.

In all the work we've done, "The Office" or "Hello Ladies" is about, sort of people, you know, and trying to find their place in the world, trying to make connections with other people, romantic connections in that way, doing it through, in a misguided way through sort of misjudged humor or whatever it might be.

But they're about sort of-- they're flawed people, tragic people in some way.

And it's about them seeking out some kind of happiness or some sense of place.

And in all of the shows we've talked about, they ultimately end on a very positive note, you know, and yes, there's discomfort in there and I like to make you feel awkward.

- Hello ladies, my name is Stuart; with me, my best mate Wade.

Right there.

- Hi Wayne.

- Wade.

Wade.

Yeah.

As in Roe versus Wade.

That's a famous case about a woman's right to term-- - They know what it is.

No need to bring up abortion.

Do we need to?

- My wife just asked for a separation after 11 years-- - Getting a bit, it's getting a bit gloomy again straight away.

Maybe head to the bar.

Get some drinks.

- No, no, that's okay.

- Please, ladies, it's our pleasure.

Get to the bar sir.

Off he goes, one of the good guys.

Unfortunately he's forgotten how to talk to beautiful women.

I however, have not.

Good evening.

Where are you guys from?

- From here.

- Can't do anything with that.

What about yourself?

- How do you know when you've gone too far with somebody like that?

How do you know when you have really hit on a character like that, especially when you are working with that kind of discomfort?

- Funnily enough, just before it started airing, I watched the first episode again and I thought, I think I need to soften some edges here cause I think I made him a little too prickly in the first episode and I asked HBO if I could recut it, but they said, oh, don't worry about it.

But clearly they should have worried about it cause you know, I think some people felt the same way.

So I felt, I felt even at the time like, oh, I think I just need to take people by the hand a little bit more and ease them in.

Save the cat a little bit more, maybe, I don't know.

But, you know, you make those mistakes.

But, I'm also interested in the idea that you don't necessarily like someone straight away and that you, and that if they're interesting at least you kind of lean in and you still wanna watch.

And that intrigues me.

And I think sometimes you can't trust the, as it were, the casual viewer to be the arbitrator of what's gonna be interesting or because-- it's like if they did a test screening on Freddy Krueger, it'd be like, don't like the guy with the knives, cut him out.

You're like, okay, now it's just some teenagers who can't sleep.

It's not a great movie.

- Certainly in "The Office" and in "Hello Ladies," there's some cynicism in that humor.

And do you think you're a cynical person?

- Ultimately, I think I am optimistic and I think I have great faith in the sort of humanity of people, and if people communicate and talk, they will find common ground and that's very much what "The Outlaws" is about.

And that's, you know, I mean that very truthfully.

But at the same time, I'm cynical in the sense that I think, you know, people are flawed, everyone's flawed, everyone makes mistakes, everyone.

And I'm quite short shrift for sort of, for arrogance and for people who are sort of blind to themselves and blind to their failings, I'm very happy to share my failings and I think a lot of the work I do is about people making mistakes falling over in one form or another.

- You've had a few collaborators and you're working now with Elgin James, which I thought was an interesting choice to seek out, that relationship because of the kind of content he writes, which is, I mean, M.C.

's is not comedy.

And so when you were looking for somebody to write with for "The Outlaws" this idea you had, you know, can you talk a little bit about how, how you were wanting to approach that that made you think of a different kind of collaborator?

- This idea originated cause my parents used to work in community service, you know, like if you get a DUI or something and you have to-- instead of sending you to prison, they make you pick up garbage or paint a shed or something.

And my parents were involved with that when I was growing up.

They supervised the criminals.

They weren't criminals themselves.

As I say my parents have done, they're very boring, they've not done any-- they may have done a couple of bank heists as far as-- it's all.

And so they would tell me about the sort of people that would come through the doors and it was always interesting to me because there was sort of, you know, you'd have like a businessman who'd got caught speeding and he was doing community service and then some kid who'd dealt a bit of pot and he'd got caught, and I just thought what an interesting, you know, sort of surrogate family that would become of unusual people that would never otherwise meet.

And that was what was interesting to me.

It was in the time of Brexit, it was Trump on the rise.

It was people had sort of retreated into their little pockets and sort of pulled up the drawbridge and it seemed to me that what was important is you dialogued, and you spoke and you tried to find the common ground rather than just assume that everyone who didn't share your views was the enemy.

And I wanted to do something that was about that and I thought this was an interesting way to explore it.

And so I wanted to write with someone who had a more dramatic sensibility but also who had perhaps had a different life experience to me.

And I didn't want it to be pure comedy.

I wanted it to have a sort of dramatic backbone and a thriller aspect.

And I asked my agents to put me in touch with someone, and I met out with Elgin and Elgin, you know, has a very different life story to me and has run with gangs when he was younger and you know, spent some time in jail and stuff.

And again, I've done very little jail time and I can count the gangs I've been in on the fingers of one hand.

So the fact, as soon as we met, we just immediately connected.

Originally it was a movie, and we wrote it as a movie script but there's about seven or eight main characters, which is obviously too many characters for a script.

So we decided to adapt it into a TV project.

And although it was originally, as I say set in America, the more I sort of talked about it and the more I thought about it, the fact that I could set it in my hometown of Bristol where my parents had done this job and which I realized was a really interesting city small enough to have-- small enough to feel intimate but big enough they would have kind of different socioeconomic groups, and it hasn't really played itself on screen much and it's very visual city and it just seemed like a really good backdrop and it allowed me to sort of-- I knew the characters, I knew where they would live, I knew how they would speak cause I'd sort of grown up there.

And it ended up being really pleasing to go back to my hometown and just cause you understand the DNA of somewhere in a way that you perhaps don't anywhere else.

- Anything under 10 kilos, vermin, cats, a small dog, that is yours.

- Can we keep it?

- No, you may not.

And you may be wondering about feces.

- You read my mind.

- If you find human feces, do not touch it.

You may handle other species feces.

- Can we keep it?

- No, you may not.

- There's such a wide variety of people and I'm curious how you talked through who they would be, you know, and would they have been different people had they been in the US?

- We found that there were sort of correlations in both countries.

And again, we tried to, to start off by choosing archetypes and by choosing stereotypes, the kind of right wing blow hard and the kind of left wing activist and the, you know, kid from the wrong side of the tracks and the, you know-- and then, you know, a difficult, challenging role for me of the awkward nerd and you know, I really wanted to challenge myself as an actor.

[audience laughs] And because we wanted to start them as stereotypes and let the audience assume them to be stereotypes and then to sort of peel back the layers and to see what has led them to that place and why have they got those opinions and those views.

And I think there is an assumption made that somehow if you're in the comedy space, that drama is this intimidating other world and that you have to sort of be more profound or more sophisticated or something.

And I disagree with that.

I think (a) I think there's a lot of humor in a lot of the best drama and a lot of drama in the best humor.

And I think, you know, right back to "The Office," there's a sort of tragedy to it.

There's a melancholy, I think there's an authenticity to the characters and their behaviors that feels like, to me at least, that's the same muscle in writing drama.

The one thing that was newer for me was the sort of genre elements.

There's a kind of thriller-y genre element to it, but that was just a really interesting-- that was just an interesting challenge.

I liked the trying to work out little heists and little kind of, you know, genre tricks, and how to sort of transpose those into a little suburban English setting.

[typewriter ding] - Empathy is, I feel like, a big part of what you're writing.

I mean is that something you're actually thinking about consciously with your characters?

- I always feel that empathy for all of them really.

I feel like I need to understand what makes them tick.

And I think in part that's been helped by acting as well, which I didn't do initially.

And the more I've done acting stuff and the more I-- I did some drama recently and in fact I'd played in a BBC drama, I played a real life serial killer called Stephen Port who is a-- it was not a comic role, it was a very serious role and a very, very serious piece of TV drama.

Not written by me but by an excellent writer in the UK, and that was the first time that I had acted in a role that exercised me in the same way that writing does.

Because you can't know the mind of a killer.

You can't understand what the motivation of that person is.

And so you have to sort of write an internal logic for that person.

Is he self delusional?

Does he think that these were all terrible mistakes?

Whatever the truth is, you have to construct some kind of logic.

If an actor's telling you something doesn't feel right or it doesn't sound right or it does not coming out of their mouth in the-- it's worth listening to.

And they may be wrong, but sometimes they're right because I think as writers, you're looking at it from the outside-in and as an actor you're on the inside looking out and you really do look at it with a different perspective.

- Your process then of looking at the characters now that you've been acting and putting them down on the page, does that change the process of writing for you?

- I think I'm a lot more ruthless in not allowing things through, which is a good idea or a good joke, but is not right for the character.

I think it's very alluring if you've got a good idea or a funny line or something and you just, I just want to cling onto this cause it's good, you know, and that old adage of kill your babies.

But I think that it's sort of, yeah, that I'm sort of-- ah, that's a great gag or a great idea.

That's just not right for that character, wouldn't say that, they wouldn't feel that at that moment.

They'd be too stressed to be making quips, whatever it might be, you know, and I think that's probably come a bit from, from acting more.

- Do you sometimes feel like you have to pull back on the comedy?

- Going right back to "The Office," that we were never afraid to not have a joke, you know, to not end the scene on a laugh, to let this scene end on a downbeat or something because we wanted it to feel authentic and we were obsessive about that.

And I think there's other things I've done where I've been less ruthless about that, but I think, yeah, I've never been afraid to have an awkward silence or a joke that doesn't quite land.

If it serves the greater good, you know, it moves the story on or it makes it feel more real or more authentic or more tragic or whatever it might be.

And so in this show, yes, I'm more than happy for a scene to not have laughs you know, or for a character not to make a quip if it will unbalance the tone of the scene or the tension of the scene.

And then of course the opposite is true where you can have a very tense scene, you know, like there's a scene in The Outlaws where we are all sort of being held at knife point by a gang, and then my character's phone starts ringing and it has a sort of jaunty, you know, kind of Caribbean salsa sort of music and then, I'm like, "Should I get this?"

And the guy's like, "Definitely not."

And I'm like, "But this is my boss.

He'll kill me."

And he's like, "What do you think I'm gonna do?

I got a knife at your throat," you know.

To me that's like, that's something that would happen to me in that moment.

If I was held at knife point by a gang member, my phone would definitely go off.

And I think the other thing that's always worth remembering is once you see it in the cutting room, things that you thought the audience would never understand, they understand immediately.

So you sort of, sometimes you feel this urge to repeat an idea in a script like two or three times.

Cause you really wanna make the point.

And actually people go-- they know it from the moment a character looks at another character.

They can see that there's a romantic charge between them.

A good example in "The Office" was we had all these sort of romantic, these kind of flirty dialogues between the Jim, Pam, Tim and Dawn characters.

And when we brought them to life with the actors, they just felt really written and a bit kind of creaky and a bit awkward.

And so in the end we just asked the actors just to have a conversation.

Just, don't flirt, just have a friendly conversation about something.

And again, cause that documentary camera's filming, it feels significant.

It feels like you're including it cause it has-- and you realize that just them being friendly is more romantic and charged than any kind of flirty dialogue that we could have written.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You have been watching Stephen Merchant, A Conversation on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the "On Story" archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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